Insects As Common Carriers.- great strides have been made in recent years by scientists in regards to the further prevention of disease by studying the life habits of insects.  It has been clearly proven that the poison or germ of certain diseases are carried by them, such as tuberculosis, typhoid fever, bowel complaints of children, by the common housefly; malaria and yellow fever by the mosquito; the bubonic plague by the rat flea, of which there are several varieties, and the squirrel flea, of which there are also several.

It is easily understood that to prevent the spread of a contagious disease from one individual to another, the precautions are not complete unless he or she be protected against either the bite of a mosquito or fleet which is received into its own blood the poison or the germ causing the disease, which conveys by biting another person.  Fly should be kept out as, by coming in contact with the spittle or discharges from a patient, they carry the germ of poison upon their feet, etc. to the food, milk, water and by direct contact to another person.

As to aid in the prevention of disease, the numerous boards of health of city and state have issued regulations and instructions whereby these insects can be destroyed and then every person, sick or well, can be protected.  If well, the flight is a danger by bringing disease into her home, if ill, it can convey our disease to another screen is home and start an epidemic.

There is distinctly different set of priorities that are being covered in this book than those we might consider today.  Typically malaria for example is only known in the tropics, but that definitive line on the globe might not have been known about back then.  Installing screens on Windows had a dual benefit of keeping out mosquitoes as well as flies.  Today we might worry about getting a discount on budget software or spending less time in traffic, but back then mosquitoes had much larger impact on the lives of people in the west much as the same insects have a great impact on people that live in Africa today.

Additional Articles from the Book of Medicine:

• Chart 1
  
  

  Here are several images captured with a digital camera covering Chart 1.

  
  
  
  
  

• Duty of the Throat
  
  

  Duty of the Throat.- the muscular bands of the throat now grasp it and pass it down the gullet into the stomach, beyond our control.  Here it comes into contact with the gastric juice, undergoes the churning motion of the stomach, discarded over by the pylorus, thoroughly saturated in mixed before entering into the intestinal tract, where it is subjected to the action of the file, the pancreatic juice and the intestinal fluid each with its special duty to perform.

   

  Again nothing terribly exciting here in this section but the next one will take us into “Nature’s Treasures Opened to Man”.

• The Ribs
  
  

  The Ribs.– the ribs are twenty-four in number, arranged in pairs, well moneyed set in the chest.  At the back they are fastened to the spine, confront the seven upper pairs are tied by cartilages to the breast bone, three are fastened to each other in the cartilage above, and two, the floating ribs, are loose.  The long, slender ribs give lightness; their arched form confers strength, and the cartilages and parts of elasticity; thus the three most essential prerequisites of the chest for the protection of the delicate organs contained within this cavity are secured, whilst the freest motion in respiration is ensured.

  This section starts to get back to some of the vocabulary that is less known today.  Words such as “whilst” and “freest” sound like something out of a bad movie about pilgrims.  In general several other sentences in this section have what I would refer to as emotional connotations that are descriptive but are not necessarily accurate and definitely do not have the cold medical sound that you would expect in a text today.  In other words it doesn’t sound very scientific.